Firewall rules problem

[Willy2]

When run on my XP laptop the new "Firewall Rule add" program doesn't show the "right click options" right away, the first time. I had to fiddle a bit (don't know what I did) to get it working. Then the second time it worked.

[Shane]

Perhaps explorer didnt take the new regkey just yet. Waiting a few min, restarting explorer.exe or rebooting should take care of it

Shane

[Willy2]

No, I didn't need to reboot. It wasn't that serious but just wanted to report this. don't know whether there's a fix for this.

[Shane]

Nothing to fix. The program just adds the regkeys under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\

Thats it. From there it is up to explorer to read and pull from the registry. The only way it would be a problem is if for some reason the program didnt add the regkeys, which it doesnt do by default, you have to open it and tell it to

Shane

[Willy2]

So, a simple "Close + Open Explorer" should always do the trick. Because then Explorer will/is supposed to read the registry again.

Ok. THanks.

[Shane]

No problem.

Also in XP and vista you will notice that the menu is 3 items, yet in 7 and 8 and newer it is 1 item then a submenu.

This is because starting with 7 MS included new regkeys you can use to make sub menus so you didn't need to make a dll file to do it any more like you had to in xp and vista.

In xp and vista it didnt support sub menus, so to make one you had to make a dll file that made all the api calls needed to make a simple sub menu plus hold the commands. What happened was if that dll went missing or got corrupt, the next time you would go to the right click menu it would either freeze or go real slow because windows was looking for the dll or trying to load it.

So MS finally made it to where the dll is no longer needed and you can have sub menus by some simple registry keys. No more need for a dll and avoids that whole problem.

So for the program in vista and xp you get 3 menu items. In 7 and 8 you get 1 item (Cleaner that way) with a submenu.

Shane